Evan Drellich, a terrific reporter for The Athletic, put out a comprehensive report<\/a> about MLB\u2019s plans to seek out a salary cap and gave us some interesting details about what they might be trying to get done.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Team and league officials describe a cap as an egalitarian reset, a leveling of the playing field that would allow teams in all markets to more fairly compete. To the Players Association, such competitive balance arguments are age-old red herrings, distractions from the owners\u2019 ultimate goal of increasing their franchise values and lining their own pockets.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n What I found most interesting about the reporting, however, was less the numbers and cap structure, and more what those numbers reveal about the team. Even more exciting, he got some quotes from people that spilled some beans that had previously gone unspilled, or at least weren\u2019t as explicitly stated previously.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So let\u2019s take some time to break it down, shall we?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Two different people are quoted in the article as saying that MLB ownership\u2019s desire for a cap stems from fan belief that their teams can\u2019t compete without one. (emphasis <\/strong>mine)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cEvery day we hear from fans<\/strong> across the country who believe<\/strong> their team doesn\u2019t have a fair opportunity to compete,\u201d league spokesperson Glen Caplin said in a statement.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n Manfred himself said prior to the 2024 World Series, which featured the Dodgers and Yankees, that \u201cour record on competitive balance is darn good.\u201d But more recently, he\u2019s harped on perception<\/strong>, saying smaller market fans worry<\/strong> their teams can\u2019t compete.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n I love the way Drellich pairs the two statements in the second quote. It\u2019s all right there; the MLB owners will have him say whatever benefits them most at the moment, even if it contradicts what he just said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At no point in the article does anyone in the article factually state that the smaller market teams can\u2019t compete. Perhaps Evan simply didn\u2019t include such a quote, but he\u2019s a well-regarded enough writer that I doubt he\u2019d omit such a key piece of testimony if it had been given.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s right there in Evan\u2019s social media post about the article, and the biggest, most obvious news of the report. An actual range for the cap and floor. But how would these numbers actually affect MLB? Per Yahoo<\/a>, in 2025, only four teams would have been over the cap, but 15 teams would have been below the floor. FanGraphs<\/a> has payroll projections for 2026 that have seven teams over in 2026, with 13 teams below the floor. The Royals, despite the perception around the sport that they are spending big for a small market team, are below the floor in both cases.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Notably, there is no mention in Evan\u2019s article of a change in MLB\u2019s revenue-sharing structure. And this is proposed as something of a starting point for the teams. This should immediately tell you that those 13-15 teams could be spending more – in many cases, a lot<\/em> more – than they are. That wouldn\u2019t be the starting point from the MLB side if it were going to make teams immediately start hemorrhaging money. These teams are currently pocketing the profits for their owners and crying poor because no one is forcing them to do any differently.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Let\u2019s stop and really think about what that additional spending could mean for a moment. Sure, if the Royals spent $200 million, they\u2019d still be a far cry from the Dodgers\u2019 current spending. But the Dodgers wouldn\u2019t actually be spending as much as they are if the smaller market teams were spending more. If the Royals increased their payroll by signing Kyle Tucker to a deal, the Dodgers\u2019 payroll would diminish even as the Royals\u2019 spending increased. The Dodgers wouldn\u2019t go out and spend that same amount of money on some other outfielder because why would you pay Kyle Tucker money to someone who isn\u2019t Kyle Tucker?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The competitive benefit of a cap-and-floor system is in the floor, not the cap. But there\u2019s literally nothing preventing the Royals, Rockies, Pirates, and other low-spending teams from spending more on their rosters right now<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Drellich has a quote from a management source that outright says this, even as it should be obvious from the previous section:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe biggest beneficiaries are going to be the biggest markets, and the biggest losers will be the small markets,\u201d said the management source. \u201cThey\u2019ll have to spend money in order to be a part of this. And the big markets will do well because there will be no pressure from fans to go to $300-400 million payrolls and so forth.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n This has been one of my biggest peeves about the recent insistence by some that the Dodgers\u2019 spending is spurring more teams to get behind a salary cap. Why would they? The teams that don\u2019t spend don\u2019t care about winning. Or, at least, they don\u2019t care about winning as much as they care about profits. It\u2019s not like any of these teams would go bankrupt if owners chose to lose a few million dollars running them while trying to win championships. Just look at Steven Cohen and the Mets. Or Ewing Kauffman and the Royals. Spending beyond your profits doesn\u2019t guarantee wins, as we can also see in both of those cases, but Kauffman didn\u2019t run out of money, and Cohen doesn\u2019t seem concerned in the slightest about his own net worth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n One of the biggest reasons a salary cap has never been implemented in MLB before is that it isn\u2019t just the players that fight it; it\u2019s a lot of the owners, too. If all of the owners united behind a salary cap, they could probably force the players to capitulate. After all, they need the profits from their teams less than the players need their salaries.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n MLB would apparently seek a \u201chard\u201d cap in the style of the NHL, which doesn\u2019t allow teams any flexibility to go over it. They would also seek to limit the length and maximum salary of free agent contracts. Then they would like to borrow a concept from the NBA cap, which adjusts player salaries ex post facto based on how much revenue the teams earn:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In some leagues that\u2019s achieved through escrow, putting money aside until the results are in. For the 2024-25 NBA season, players had to effectively give back nearly $500 million amidst declining TV revenues. Sources said MLB will likely propose escrow.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n These would mostly harm the very best players more than the people in the middle and lower ends, but don\u2019t imagine that it wouldn\u2019t also affect every player to some degree. If Kyle Tucker is limited to $30 million a year, why should Seth Lugo, who is not half as valuable, get $20 million? And every player would have to give back some portion of their salary if MLB had a season like the NBA with declining TV revenues – oh, that\u2019s right, MLB is already<\/em> having such seasons.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A salary cap is inherently and definitionally an anti-labor policy. Owners can harp about competitive balance all they want, and even if they were correct, it would only be as a side effect. The primary effect of a salary cap is to reduce the maximum earning potential of the laborers in such a system. It\u2019s so anti-labor, in fact, that you could hardly imagine any other industry implementing such a thing, even as labor protections in the United States have gotten weaker over the last 50 years or so.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n However, in Drellich\u2019s article, he indicates that MLB would supposedly consider increasing rookie pay and decreasing the amount of time to reach free agency if a cap-and-floor system were instituted. That would clearly benefit labor, especially the weakest members of the labor class who have the least power. The Juan Sotos and Kyle Tuckers would likely have to settle for much smaller contracts, but the Vinnie Pasquantinos would likely see their lots improve. Would it therefore be worth it from a labor perspective to agree to such a compromise? It\u2019s hard to say, especially without clear definitions of how the cap would be defined. What percentage of profits would the cap be pegged to? Would the revenues from nearby real estate development, something more and more teams are pivoting toward, be counted? How much more would the rookies be paid, and how much faster would they reach free agency?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I won\u2019t say that MLB should never institute a salary cap because compromises are a part of life, and if the cap came with enough other concessions from the owners that benefited the players, it would ultimately be worth it. I will say that, given how ownership is already divided about these things, I seriously doubt the concessions would ever reach the level that would become a net benefit to the players.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.royalsreview.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Evan Drellich, a terrific reporter for The Athletic, put out a comprehensive report about MLB\u2019s plans to seek out a salary cap and gave us some interesting details about what they might be trying to get done. Team and league officials describe a cap as an egalitarian reset, a leveling of the playing field that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2279238,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[242317,340874],"class_list":["post-2279237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty","tag-hok-talk","tag-royals-editorials-reactions"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Details-about-a-potential-salary-cap-raise-more-questions-than.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2279237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2279237"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2279237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2279239,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2279237\/revisions\/2279239"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2279238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2279237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2279237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2279237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
Fans \u201cbelieve\u201d their teams can\u2019t compete<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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MLB could be seeking a cap of $240 million and a floor of $160 million<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
A cap most benefits the richest teams<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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MLB wants to take the most labor-antagonistic features from every other cap system<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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It\u2019s still very complex in the end<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n